23. Here's the real story: Blackwater managers ran the CIA unit that allowed 9/11 hijackers into the US

Edited on Fri Dec-04-09 08:30 AM by leveymg

Cofer Black was CIA Chief of Station in Khartoum in the mid-1990s at the time that bin Laden, Abu Zubaydeh, KSM and many of the other principal 9/11 plotters were running CIA-assisted paramilitary operations against the Russians from bases in Sudan. Black has admitted in Congressional testimony that he had met bin Laden there at the time. You can draw your own conclusions about whether Black was UBL's control officer, but it has to at least be considered as a possibility.

After the East Asia Embassy bombings in 1998, Black was brought in from the field by CIA Director George Tenet to head the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA/CTC), along with a Tenet protege Richard Blee, with Rob Richer as another Deputy. In late December 1999, the NSA picked up a communication from Nawaf al-Hazmi through an AQ communications center run by al-Hazmi's uncle in Yemen. That communique indicated that a summit meeting of al-Qaeda figures was being convened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in the first two weeks of January, 2000. The CIA/CTC had ten days to prepare, and started surveillance, including videotape, of that meeting. According to the 9/11 Commission, both the 9/11 Planes Operation and the USS Cole attacks were planned there. CIA Director Tenet was briefed about that meeting. In the second week of January, al-Hazmi and his partner Khalid al-Midhar departed Kuala Lumpur in the company of "Khalad" bin-Atash, who headed bin Laden's personal security detail in Sudan.

COFER BLACK On January 15, 2000, al-Hazmi and al-Midhar entered the US at Los Angeles, and immediately met an air attache working under civilian cover (Dallah-AVCO Air Services) out of the Saudi Consulate in LA, who gave the pair funds from a Riggs Bank account and drove the pair to San Diego, installing them in a rental unit under the supervision of several figures, including a Iman who would end up at the center of another terrorist attack in 2009. The entry of the pair, who would go on to hijack AA Flt 77 that crashed into the Pentagon was noted at CTC, and a warning cable was drafted by the FBI liaison officer, but withheld at the direct order of the CTC Assn't Director, Richard Blee, Cofer Black's No. 2.

Black and Blee ran CTC during the next 20 months that the Flt. 77 hijackers were allowed to run free inside the US, taking flight training and meeting frequently with other 9/11 attack cell members. During that time, the FBI I-49 National Security Unit, under the command of John O'Neill -- which was charged with monitoring AQ inside the US, and had been frustrated in its investigation of the Cole attack - was kept in the dark. O'Neill resigned from the FBI shortly before 9/11, when he was killed during the collapse of the World Trade Center, where he had taken the job as head of security. In the summer of 2001, O'Neill and I-49 officers repeatedly clashed with Black and Blee over the CIA's refusal to turn over CIA files about the attack squads the FBI knew from other sources were plotting attacks inside the US. FBI warrants for electronic surveillance were withheld by ranking figures in Washington.

By July, it was clear what the targets of the hijackers were and the time-frame they would be hit. On the 10th, Tenet, Black, and Blee got into a CIA SUV, and visited National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and had a tense meeting with her about al-Qaeda. According to Tenet, she seemed to understand the threat, but was ambivalent in her response. Finally, in mid August, Tenet got on a CIA jet and visited President Bush in Crawford, where the President had been deposited for safe-keeping since returning in early July from Genoa, where ground-to-air missiles were installed to protect him from suspected al-Qaeda attack by aircraft. Tenet went on to perjure himself before the 9/11 Commission, falsely claiming he had had no communication with Bush during the 60 days before 9/11. In fact, records showed they had talked on at least a dozen occasions, including the face-to-face on either August 15 or 21, the latter date being the day the FBI finally got alerted and some of the details about the entry of al-Hazmi and al-Midhar 19 months earlier.

Black resigned from the CIA in April 2002, after interrogation of Abu Zubaydeh revealed the names of leading Saudi and Pakistani figures who had bankrolled the operation, and after the apparently willful failure of Jawbreaker, the CIA-run operation to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan the previous December. Apparently willful is the watchword for the Bush-Cheney management of this element of the CIA, which went on to run a division of Blackwater, and in the actions of these individuals in failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks and failure to capture top terrorist leaders thereafter.

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